You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
geoffreylittle 's review for:
Cross Roads
by Wm. Paul Young
It’s an embarrassing, puerile feeling, the curiosity if someone, once so lucky, now might fail. I felt such a thing as I picked up and began William Paul Young’s Cross Roads novel, out this month. Published by FaithWords (Hachette), Cross Roads is the follow-up to Young’s 18 million-copy bestseller, The Shack, that donkey of a religious fiction title. A donkey, I confess, I rather loved.
The Shack was too clumsy to discuss in any literary circle I know, what with its constant breadcrumbing of the protagonist’s emotions. It was exhausting to be so distrusted by an author. I assumed this failing was because Young had written so little, that better narrative technique and style were not much available to him. (Supposedly, The Shack was his first book, originally intended for an audience only of his family.) The Shack’s success was its fleshed-out theology – chiefly, Grace – grace not as a pleasant silver lining, gilding reality, making us safe. No, grace was a furious squall, barely contained behind the human space-time continuum. It was a ton of good news, for religious Christians in particular.
The reason I re-hash The Shack is that Cross Roads is more of the same. God and Jesus show up much as before in liminal space, acting as dominant characters throughout. It’s another rebirth plot. Like in The Shack, the deities end up being a lot like us relationally. They appreciate us more than we know, and want the time to talk. Who cares if we are mere mortals? The story we are led through here is a vehicle for God and Jesus’s characters to pontificate to the protagonist (and to us the reader) on the choices the main character has made and could make. I am not super familiar with “religious fiction”; perhaps this is the way the novel has to be.
If so, it is a little much, but such therapeutic work is where Young (again) thrives. I opened this article posing if Young might choke on his sophomore effort. No worry. It’s just more Shack, with a wider panorama of characters and subplots.
Anthony Spencer, our business executive hero, is introduced in the first chapter with great skill. (I was impressed with the early drawing of him; it’s great writing, and I wondered if this caliber would be maintained. Not so much.) “Tony,” at first, is not a happy guy. Like Mack in the Shack, Tony has a slow, plotted conversion in Cross Roads. The pull: given his change, how will he make things right? There’s plenty of Christmas Carol here, and Tony never moves off script. This said, Cross Roads is a highly original book. Set in Portland, Oregon’s downtown, never would you imagine soon alternating chapters of astral projection mixed with a Pilgrim’s Progress re-telling. Young is alive and risky in Cross Roads. He will continue to enlighten and uplift through his unique brand of inspiration. A man with a vast imagination and heart to match, I look forward to William Paul Young’s next book, and the hope of his further evolution as a storyteller.
The Shack was too clumsy to discuss in any literary circle I know, what with its constant breadcrumbing of the protagonist’s emotions. It was exhausting to be so distrusted by an author. I assumed this failing was because Young had written so little, that better narrative technique and style were not much available to him. (Supposedly, The Shack was his first book, originally intended for an audience only of his family.) The Shack’s success was its fleshed-out theology – chiefly, Grace – grace not as a pleasant silver lining, gilding reality, making us safe. No, grace was a furious squall, barely contained behind the human space-time continuum. It was a ton of good news, for religious Christians in particular.
The reason I re-hash The Shack is that Cross Roads is more of the same. God and Jesus show up much as before in liminal space, acting as dominant characters throughout. It’s another rebirth plot. Like in The Shack, the deities end up being a lot like us relationally. They appreciate us more than we know, and want the time to talk. Who cares if we are mere mortals? The story we are led through here is a vehicle for God and Jesus’s characters to pontificate to the protagonist (and to us the reader) on the choices the main character has made and could make. I am not super familiar with “religious fiction”; perhaps this is the way the novel has to be.
If so, it is a little much, but such therapeutic work is where Young (again) thrives. I opened this article posing if Young might choke on his sophomore effort. No worry. It’s just more Shack, with a wider panorama of characters and subplots.
Anthony Spencer, our business executive hero, is introduced in the first chapter with great skill. (I was impressed with the early drawing of him; it’s great writing, and I wondered if this caliber would be maintained. Not so much.) “Tony,” at first, is not a happy guy. Like Mack in the Shack, Tony has a slow, plotted conversion in Cross Roads. The pull: given his change, how will he make things right? There’s plenty of Christmas Carol here, and Tony never moves off script. This said, Cross Roads is a highly original book. Set in Portland, Oregon’s downtown, never would you imagine soon alternating chapters of astral projection mixed with a Pilgrim’s Progress re-telling. Young is alive and risky in Cross Roads. He will continue to enlighten and uplift through his unique brand of inspiration. A man with a vast imagination and heart to match, I look forward to William Paul Young’s next book, and the hope of his further evolution as a storyteller.